Sheep can now be remotely fed, watered and weighed, with a new electronic flock management system being developed in Australia.

“It’s the way of the future where animals don’t even realise they’re being managed, they’re just going about their daily business,” says Bill Murray from Australian Sheep Industry CRC.

Walk-Through-Weighing equipment set up in a paddock at Prattenville, Bourke (image source).

The system, that will allow farmers to manage their livestock from a PC, is based on a series of “trap yards” that channel sheep through in single file. Tag readers identify each sheep by the tags clipped to their ears as they go past and they’re weighed on automated weighing platforms.

“The animal goes through to have a drink but as a by-product we know its identity, what it weighed today and what time it went through,” Murray says.

Special drafting gates can be programmed to select individual sheep when they’re ready for market or if they need to fatten up. “If we want animals of a certain weight it says, ‘this is one of those’, they go to the side and we can take them away,” he says. “Or it says, ‘you need an extra feed’, it opens the gate, they have something to eat and then go back out.”

An electronic nose is also being developed to “sniff out” sheep with conditions like flystrike and activate a spray.

Via ABC News.